Xenia Boodberg Lee

Xenia Boodberg Lee
Xenia Boodberg Lee, from a 1953 newspaper
Born	Xenia Boodberg (1927-11-28)November 28, 1927 Oakland, California
Died	September 27, 2004(2004-09-27) (aged 76)
Nationality	American
Other names	Xenia Lee
Occupation	pianist

Xenia Boodberg Lee (November 28, 1927 – September 27, 2004) was an American concert pianist, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Early life

Xenia Boodberg was born in Oakland, California,^[1] the only child^[2] of Peter A. Boodberg (1903-1972) and Elena (Helen) Boodberg (1896-1980). Her father was a Russian-born Baltic German linguistics scholar and professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California in Berkeley.^[3] Her aunt Valentina A. Vernon recalled that her parents tried to raise her without speaking English as a small child, "only French and Russian".^[4]

Xenia Boodberg was a creative child, publishing poems and stories in the Berkeley newspaper at age 8,

Soon after college, in January 1949, she gave a program of piano music by composers Darius Milhaud, Roger Sessions, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, Béla Bartók, and Claude Debussy in New York, of which The New York Times reviewer commented, "Miss Boodberg remains a pianist of unusual potentialities, especially in the field of new music".^[14] She played recitals and concerts, especially twentieth-century works,^[15] in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere, often and for many years afterwards,^{[16][17][18][19][20]} into the 1970s.^[21] She was a member of the San Francisco Musical Club and played with the Oakland Symphony and the Stockton Symphony.^[22]

Personal life

Before February 1950, Xenia Boodberg married Richard Henry Lee, a marine sergeant and Korean War veteran,^[23] and a descendant of American founding father Richard Henry Lee.^[24] They had two children, Richard and Julie.^[4] She died in 2004, aged 76 years.^[25]

References